There is a County office up, a School Board seat, a Fire District seat, a Water District seat, a Wastewater District seat, and a Hospital District seat.

Y'know, if you're a cowardly technocrat, this is probably a good year to get what you want, because these are the sorts of ballots that draw a small number of steady local participants and a modest number of attentive technocrats.

I use the word cowardly for a reason.

A modest excise tax increase on fish with a weird costline attached, all of a million dollars.

A retail tax exemption expansion projected to hit $565 million over ten years.

Oh, right, and then there's that.

See, the state Supreme Court found, some years ago, that the legislature was underfunding the schools. The legislature has since fought about how to fix that problem, with solutions ranging from making things worse to not doing a damn thing to not doing enough. It is, technically, a human-inflicted disaster.

So, right. They need to figure that out. So the legislature is sending to the people a new property tax package (Advisory Vote 18↱) with a ten year price tag of $12.95 billion.

Two things about that: First, they are sending it to the People because we passed one of those stupid populist laws like the one that wrecked California because we were apparently rather quite envious. That is to say, they're not entirely chickening out by sending it to the People; they cannot not send it to the People. The other part is that from the outset every rightward maneuver has been to screw the whole thing because who the hell is the state Supreme Court to say anything? No, really, two Democrats rolled after an election in order to pitch the state Senate to the Republicans in order to prevent anyone from solving the problem.

Naturally, they have slapped together the leaast attractive package they possibly could, one that won't actually get the job done, and sent it to the people.

Advisory Vote 18 asks if you want to fuck over schoolchildren. On June 30, Washington State legislators hastily passed a last-minute budget, which included a plan to fully fund state public schools to comply with the Washington State Supreme Court's 2012 McCleary ruling. Their solution: increasing property taxes to generate about $13 billion for public schools. For the average Seattle homeowner, that means paying more than $400 a year in additional property taxes. Using property tax revenue to fund critical services is a shitty, regressive move—we know that—but we have to do it for the sake of Washington's K–12 students. So vote maintained—NOT THAT YOUR VOTE MATTERS—then demand better funding solutions from our state legislators.​

Yeah, that's about how it goes. Welcome to the Evergreen State.
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